Organizing Powers in Eventful Times

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth S. Clemens
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Network Ties ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Strategic Response ◽  
Scientific Explanations ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Economic Collapse ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Sequential Comparison ◽  
Historical Periods

Historical and social scientific explanations often rely on major happenings and crises to define the topics of our inquiries or to delineate historical periods. But these models often prove limited and problematic. The challenge is to understand how action unfolds in a crisis and, in the process, reconfigures resources, opportunities, and horizons of possibility for new lines of strategic response. These questions are addressed through a comparison of Herbert Hoover and Harry Hopkins as they dealt with the onset of the Great Depression. Both men had the skills, network ties, and reputational resources that figure centrally in models of effective agency, but the contemporary assessments of their efforts differed dramatically. This pair of lives—Hoover and Hopkins—permits a cross-sectional comparison as both men wrestled with the onset of economic collapse and a sequential comparison as Hopkins inherited responsibility for relieving a crisis that had been shaped and reshaped by Hoover's actions.

Public Relief and Private Employment in the Great Depression

1981 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Joseph Wallis ◽  
Daniel K. Benjamin
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Federal Budget ◽  
Single Factor ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Emergency Relief ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Private Employment

The unemployment relief programs introduced by the federal government in the 1930s were the largest single factor in the growth of the federal budget over the decade. We develop a model that enables us to estimate the effects of the relief programs on private employment. Cross-sectional data bearing on the operation of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration rejects the hypothesis that the federal relief programs reduced private employment. Individuals did respond to the incentives of relief benefits, but only by moving between relief and non-relief unemployment.

The Great Depression

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Gellman ◽  
Margaret Rung
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Economic History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Family Structures ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
Adequate Food ◽  
Economic Collapse ◽  
Modern Economic ◽  
And Gender

From the late 1920s through the 1930s, countries on every inhabited continent suffered through a dramatic and wrenching economic contraction termed the Great Depression, an economic collapse that has come to represent the nadir of modern economic history. With national unemployment reaching well into double digits for over a decade, productivity levels falling by half, prices severely depressed, and millions of Americans without adequate food, shelter or clothing, the United States experienced some of the Great Depression’s severest consequences. The crisis left deep physical, psychological, political, social, and cultural impressions on the national landscape. It encouraged political reform and reaction, renewed labor activism, spurred migration, unleashed grass-roots movements, inspired cultural experimentation, and challenged family structures and gender roles.

2. History

2018 ◽  
pp. 20-32
Author(s):  
Philip N. Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
International Trade ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Vulnerable People ◽  
Agricultural Societies ◽  
Ancient Problem ◽  
Historical Periods

Poverty is an ancient problem. In the pre-modern period, poverty was synonymous with hunger, but the kind of poverty we recognize today arose with the emergence of the market economy. ‘History’ considers the range of factors acting within and across societies that had negative effects on vulnerable people in different historical periods: the agricultural societies before the 16th century; societal and governmental responses to poverty during the 16th and 17th centuries; the effects of colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries; globalization, industrialization, and the expansion of international trade in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and the precursors to modern anti-poverty programs after the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Charles E. Mitchell: Scapegoat of the Crash?

1986 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas F. Huertas ◽  
Joan L. Silverman
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Federal Reserve ◽  
Good Sense ◽  
Federal Reserve System ◽  
Monetary Policies ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Economic Collapse ◽  
Economic Good ◽  
Reserve System

Extremely successful both as an investment and as a commercial banker, Charles E. Mitchell was identified by contemporaries as the epitome of the unscrupulous “money changers” whose speculative dealings they felt played a major role in the Crash of 1929 and the ensuing economic collapse. This portrayal has been echoed and elaborated by historians and commentators down to the present day. In this article Dr. Huertas and Dr. Silverman demonstrate that Mitchell's activities, while sometimes ill-advised, were motivated by the economic“good sense” of the day and were not attributable to either rampant immorality or ungoverned greed. At the same time, they direct the attention of economic historians to the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve system in the 1920s and 1930s—in which Mitchell also played a role—and suggest that a more potent source of the Great Depression lies therein.

The Distribution of the Income in the Great Depression: Preliminary State Estimates

1983 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 217-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Schmitz ◽  
Price V. Fishback
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Capita Income ◽  
State Level ◽  
Per Capita Income ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Per Capita

State-level estimates of income shares for the top one and five percent of the population are presented for 1929, 1933, and 1939. Significant cross-sectional variation is found in 1929, but the range narrows as the shares fall dramatically to 1933. Analysis indicates that property incomes influence the shares but provides little evidence of a tradeoff between per capita income and inequality as measured by the shares.

Entrepreneurship and Labor Absorption: Blacks and Whites in Northern U.S. Cities During the Great Depression

2021 ◽  
pp. 003464462110605
Author(s):  
Robert L. Boyd
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Black Business ◽  
The United States ◽  
Absorption Capacity ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
Social Scientific

An extensive literature on newly developing societies shows that the urban economy's entrepreneurial sector can absorb a sizable share of persons who are unemployed and searching for work. Surprisingly, however, little research on the United States has examined entrepreneurship's labor absorption capacity. The present study fills this gap by analyzing Blacks and Whites in northern U.S. cities during the Great Depression, a time of widespread joblessness, particularly among Blacks. The results suggest that, if not for Blacks’ uniquely severe resource deprivation, Black entrepreneurship could have absorbed a large number of jobless Blacks. Labor absorption estimates, calculated with 1940 Census data, indicate that one-third of the Black-White unemployment difference is attributable to racial inequality of entrepreneurial outcomes. This historical evidence advances social-scientific understanding of racial inequality during the Great Depression and informs a longstanding debate about the merits of promoting Black business ownership as a strategy for improving Blacks’ labor market prospects.

Remaking the Heartland

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Objective Observer ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Changing Times ◽  
Middle West

For many Americans, the Middle West is a vast unknown. This book sets out to rectify this. It shows how the region has undergone extraordinary social transformations over the past half-century and proven itself surprisingly resilient in the face of such hardships as the Great Depression and the movement of residents to other parts of the country. It examines the heartland's reinvention throughout the decades and traces the social and economic factors that have helped it to survive and prosper. The book points to the critical strength of the region's social institutions established between 1870 and 1950—the market towns, farmsteads, one-room schoolhouses, townships, rural cooperatives, and manufacturing centers that have adapted with the changing times. It focuses on farmers' struggles to recover from the Great Depression well into the 1950s, the cultural redefinition and modernization of the region's image that occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, the growth of secondary and higher education, the decline of small towns, the redeployment of agribusiness, and the rapid expansion of edge cities. Drawing arguments from extensive interviews and evidence from the towns and counties of the Midwest, the book provides a unique perspective as both an objective observer and someone who grew up there. It offers an accessible look at the humble yet strong foundations that have allowed the region to endure undiminished.

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